Op-Ed: Back in the 80's We Really Believed in Peace

I was young then. I had dreams of Peace and co-existence just like everyone else, and I thought most of us were on board.

Dr. Zeev Shemer
The writer is the author of “Israel and the Palestinian nightmare”, “Israel Redeemed” and “The Answer”. He lectures for Bar Ilan University at the college's branches in the north of Israel, specializing in Zionism and comparative religion.

Back in the 80’s Arabs did not have autonomy, weapons, or a so-called police force. Back in the 80’s Arabs would riot, as many do today in Jerusalem and elsewhere, throw rocks, burn tires, and charge against the police and soldiers who timidly tried to calm them down.

Back in the 80’s there was a sincere desire by many to make Peace with Arabs even as they professed their hatred of Israel and their hatred of the Jews. “Give them plumbing and microwave ovens and they will come to love us,” proposed Shimon Peres and the other leftwing pioneers.

Back in the 80’s a lot of good people wanted to believe that Peace could be reached and they were willing to sacrifice parts of Israel for the its sake. Victims of terror were called “sacrifices for Peace” and their leading movement was called “Peace Now”.

We were willing to do whatever it took. We screamed “Du-kium” (co-existence) as loud and often as we could.  We played John Lennon’s “Imagine” every 20 minutes, and even a radio station was called ‘The Voice of Peace’.

Arab and Jew can live together. After all, Sephardic Jews had been living with Arabs for hundreds of years and they never endured the level of pogroms and the Holocaust that their Ashkenazi counterparts did, we were told.  They were living proof that Arabs and Jews can be friends. And we were willing to do whatever it took.  

“Yes,” we answered to our number one diplomat and appeaser, Shimon Peres. “Yes, give them toilets and microwave ovens,” and ever since, Israel has been providing Arab towns and villages with more or less free water and electricity. After all, it was for the sake of Peace.

A strange thing was, that as opposed to our state, they wanted no Jews in theirs. Well, it’s okay; after all, we have our own country now. We ignored their racism.
We suddenly realized that many Arabs wanted more than just co-existence. They wanted a state of their own. And why not? Jews that came from Europe and the Arab world, we created a state, why couldn’t they do the same?  A strange thing was, that as opposed to our state, they wanted no Jews in theirs. Well, it’s okay; after all, we have our own country now. We ignored their racism.  

Thing is, they began chanting, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”  Hold on here. That leaves nothing for a Jewish state. Not even the small “From Hedera to Gedera” of leftwing extremists e.g. Yossi Beilin and Yossi Sarid. Even so, Peres didn’t seem to mind; him and Rabin claimed this was only the extremists who were being unreasonable, and that Arabs in general are good people, they said. They will set the tone for our Peace.

We were getting a bit nervous when every week there was another murder; another Jewish family in mourning. Our soldiers were then forbidden to take rides with civilians and cement blocks began guarding most bus stops across the country. 

I was young then. I had dreams of Peace and co-existence just like everyone else, and I thought most of us were on board. I attended Tel Aviv Universitywhere the Arab ‘cause’ was spearheaded in front of any Jewish claim to their ancestral land.  Lies about this fictitious people calling themselves ‘Palestinians’ rather than Arabs living in the area the Romans named Palestine way before there was an Islam began taking form.

Imagine my outrage when we were told a ‘rabbi’ – and how much we disliked rabbis – was coming to our campus to protest against Arab subsidies. The indignation! We decided not to go to class and, instead, go and show this rabbi that we, the Peace-loving Jews are, well, peace-loving.  Policemen came in large number, many on horses. We screamed and spit and chanted for Peace. And that rabbi, even with his bullhorn, could not be heard. We were victorious!

I asked one of my classmates – my Hebrew was not the best – about what he had come to say. “He’s a fascist,” she said. “He came here to speak badly about the Arabs. He came to say that one day they would bomb our buses and restaurants; the hutzpah!”

“Bomb our buses?” I asked.

“Yes,” she explained. “He says they will blow themselves up in bus stops and busy streets, in our malls, and in our markets.”

Well, he was clearly an anti-peace lunatic!  He claimed Arabs were teaching their children from a young age to hate Israel and that killing Jews would bring them closer to paradise. Outrageous! Who teaches their children to hate? And who would blow himself up just to kill a few Jews? And what did this rabbi propose we do instead? My friend explained that he proposed to transfer Arabs that hate Israel to the other side of the border, to the other “Palestine,” the one the British had turned into a Muslim state called Jordan.

Months later, I heard he was banned from the Knesset and members of the Likud were ecstatic! But the newspapers were filled with stories of murderous attacks by Arab marauders. Maybe, just maybe, he wasn’t as crazy as my classmates claimed. But it didn’t matter, because a couple of years later he was murdered.

After Rabin and his partners Peres and Beilin, who rescued Arafat from Tunisia and oblivion, signed the Oslo Accords, thousands of Jews were subsequently murdered just like that outshouted Rabbi Kahane had predicted. Free water and electricity, weapons for their ‘police force’ were given to them by our leaders, and parts of our precious ancestral land were given away all in the name of that Peace I once worshiped. 

This year I did not attend Yitzhak Rabin’s memorial. This year after thousands of rockets were fired from Gaza and our leaders continued to supply our enemies with water, electricity, and supplies, I realized that the Peace brainwashing I had once been exposed to had destroyed the neurons of many of my fellow countrymen.

This year I invite you to come to Jerusalem this coming Monday or Tuesday. It will be a memorial very different from that in honor of Rabin. In this memorial you will be exposed to a unique group of individuals that for some reason were immune to the brainwashing and the delusions of Peace. A group of people who have a much clearer understanding of what Peace is really all about. People who understand that ‘Ahavat Yisrael’, love of Israel and ‘Yirat Shamayim’, awe of G-d, are the forces that kept our dream of returning to our land alive.

When Jabotisnksy traveled from town to town warning Jews of the incoming tragedies that would befall them, he was met with the same hatred and rejection I once showed this rabbi who now everyone knows, was one hundred percent right.

Those that did not heed Jabotinsky’s warnings literarily went up in smoke. For the sake of my children and grandchildren, for the sake of the Jewish dream of Zion, I will share a few moments with the ‘crazy’ people that happen to be sane.

(Note: the program referred to is for Rabbi Kahana hy"d's yahrzeit and takes place at Yeshivat Haraayon Hayehudi, 11 Shmarya St. Jerusalem. In English on Monday evening November 10 from 6pm and in Hebrew, on Tuesday November 11, with shiurim from 12 noon, aliya lakever at 4pm and an additional program at 6 pm  Heichal David, 14 Ohaliav St., Romema.)

Another article by . Zeev Shemer

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/13231#.VGGzmfmUeVM

Op-Ed: Palestinian 'Narrative'? Their Own Covenant Refutes It

As Mahmoud Abbas continues his denial of any Jewish connection to the land and the Temple Mount, one need only take a close look at the PLO Covenant to see that his 'narrative' is false

Dr. Yale Zussman

In recent years, the Palestinian Arabs, broadly conceived to include the Palestinian Authority, the various political and militant factions, and their supporters abroad, have been pushing a narrative in which a flourishing Palestinian Arab national society of ancient origin was brutally attacked and overrun by an imperialist Zionist invasion intent on stealing what had been their "Palestine" since time immemorial. 

Curiously, the Covenant of the Palestine Liberation Organization, initially adopted in 1964 and revised in 1968, contains an article that refutes this claim.

Article 6 of the Covenant reads: "Jews who were living permanently in Palestine until the beginning of the Zionist invasion will be considered Palestinian."  That "invasion" is usually identified with the Balfour Declaration of 1917, so this article acknowledges that there were Jews in the Land before then.

Let us leave aside that Abbas's insistence that his Palestinian state be Judenreinviolates this provision of the supposedly sacred Covenant and address the question:  Who were these Jews?

The Quran makes no mention of "Palestine".
Conceptually, they potentially fall into three categories, any one of which establishes that the Palestinian narrative is false.

The first possible source of pre-1917 Jews would be those who had been living in the Land at the time of the Arab invasion in the Seventh Century.  There is no credible way to explain the existence of such Jews without acknowledging that the Land was their homeland.  Why would they have come there at that time if they had no previous connection? 

Indeed, the Quran actually confirms that this was the case:  Surah 5, verse 21 begins:"O my people! (referring to the Children of Israel)  Go into the holy land which Allah has ordained for you."  (Pickthall interpretation) The existence of such Jews demonstrates that Jewish claims about prior habitation are correct.

What, then, are we to make of Palestinian Foreign Minister Riyadh al-Malaiki's  statement on ash-Sharq al-Awsat, "This is the issue of recognizing the Jewish nature of the Israeli state. This is a sharply contentious issue. It would be dangerous to recognize this because this would mean our acceptance of the dissolution of our own history and ties and our historic right to Palestine. This is something that we will never accept under any circumstances."

We also have the following statement from Ahmad Samih Khalidi of the Institute of Palestine Studies in 2011:  "[I]f Israel is the homeland of the Jewish people, then the lands that it occupies today (and perhaps more, for there are as yet no borders to this “homeland”) belong to this people by way of right. And if these lands rightfully comprise the Jewish homeland, then the Arab presence there becomes historically aberrant and contingent; the Palestinians effectively become historic interlopers and trespassers -- a transient presence on someone else’s national soil."

Seen against Article 6 of the Palestinian Ljiberation Organization Covenant these statements lead inexorably to the conclusion that the Palestinian Arab narrative is false.  The Palestinian leadership must know that their narrative is false.

Incidentally, the Quran makes no mention of "Palestine".  And the Palestinian 'narrative' asserts that Surah 5, verse 21, is false.

The second possible source of pre-1917 Jews would be those who might have arrived between the Arab conquest and the beginning of the Zionist awakening in the Nineteenth Century.  Why would they have come, knowing full-well that they would be subjected to the dhimma, a system of discrimination that is the ancestor of apartheid, if there was no previous connection to the Land?  There were such people, mainly pious pilgrims seeking to live out their lives inthe Land of their fathers; they settled mainly in Jerusalem and Safed.  One of these was Joseph Caro, who wrote the code of Jewish law still used today.  Undoubtedly, their descendants inter-married with descendants of Jews who had returned earlier and with Jews whose ancestors had lived there since before the Arab invasion, so in some sense, the first two groups can be conceived as having merged into one.

The third possible source of pre-1917 Jews are those who arrived with the First and Second Aliyot, estimated to total some 65,000 people.  For the record, the First Aliyah was before the establishment of the Zionist Movement and thus cannot be deemed part of any "Zionist" invasion.  For the most part, these people arrived in small groups, by boat to Jaffa and then made their way on foot or by donkey to land purchased for them by European Jewish philanthropists.  They came to work the land, rather than as religious pilgrims, so they were fairly easy to find.  The notion that they came against the will of the sovereign at the time, the Ottoman Empire, is basically unsupportable.

Why might the Ottoman sultan, who was also the khalifah, have welcomed Jews to this part of his empire?  Jews had been welcomed into the Ottoman state since shortly after the expulsion from Spain in 1492, and had made valuable contributions to the modernization of the Empire.  For example, Jews brought the first printing press.  There is also the matter that these Jews had good connections in the major European powers, Britain, France, Germany, and Russia, and the Ottomans hoped they could be used to gain influence in the capitals of those powers.

There is a potentially more important reason that often goes overlooked:  During the late Nineteenth Century, the Land was on the frontier between the Ottoman Empire and a resurgent Egypt that had British backing.  The Ottomans were concerned that this largely-unpopulated territory didn't provide much of a barrier to Anglo-Egyptian ambitions.  That is why they sought to bring various population groups there from elsewhere.

The record is very clear that the Ottoman government sought to populate the area with basically anyone willing to move there.  Muslim tribes were attracted from elsewhere in the Empire and from Turkic Central Asia.  A large number of Bosnians was transferred there when Austria seized Bosnia in 1878, which is why the Palestinian Arab leader during World War II, Haj Amin al-Husseini, was able to recruit Bosnians to fight for Hitler.

European Jews brought new technologies from Europe, and money, permitting the economic growth necessary to attract the Muslim groups from elsewhere; they were necessary to the success of the Ottoman strategy.  The Ottomans let the dhimma slip into the shadows while this effort was underway.  That the Ottomans undertook this effort demonstrates that the Land was underpopulated in the late Nineteenth Century.  That it had the approval of the khalifah is why the Covenant grants Palestinian identity to Jews present by 1917.

And it all would have worked just fine, except the Ottoman Empire came to an end.  Government ministers, as a rule, do not factor the consequences of the demise of their state into their thinking about policies to adopt.  In this case, they gave no consideration to how the Jews, both autochthonous and more recently returned, and Muslim peoples, again both those of long standing and those they were bringing into the Land, might get along without Ottoman suzerainty.

Jews who had arrived with the First or Second Aliyah had no previous experience of living as dhimmis, second-class citizens subject to the dhimma, and would not accept that status, particularly since they had taken the lead in developing the Land.  There was little prospect that the Arab population would abandon it, since in its absence, Jews would continue to hold at least the economic reins. 

The Balfour Declaration was issued into this mix, asserting that Jews would have rights in the Land, i.e., the dhimma would not be re-established.  Conflict became inevitable, with only two solutions: One or the other of the parties would have to expel the other, or there needed to be a partition, so each party would have its own state.  The Arab population has routinely rejected partition and, obviously, both parties reject the idea that the other is entitled to push them out. 

The world has been trying to untie this knot ever since.

The Yishuv's Jewish population in 1917 consisted of people from each of the three sources, but even if they all came from only one of them, the acknowledgement in the Palestine LIberation Organization's National Covenant that there were Jews there before 1917 disproves the current Palestinian Arab narrative's claim that the Land has been home "since time immemorial" to a thriving Palestinian Arab culture. 

If the Jews are from the first source, then they predate the Palestinian Arab arrival. 

The second source pre-supposes the existence of the first. 

The third source reflects Ottoman recognition that the Land was underpopulated and in need of a revival; i.e., whatever culture was there could hardly be described as flourishing.

The Palestinian Arab narrative is thus hoist with its own petard: The Palestinian "people"'s founding document announces that its narrative isn't true.